The docuseries that forever sweeps away the concept of crime of passion

In the summer of 2003, Marie Trintignant was admitted to a Vilnius hospital in a coma. The actress was in Lithuania filming a biopic about the writer Colette in a very family-friendly setting: it was directed by her mother, Nadine Trintignant, and also featured Roman Kolinka, her eldest son, and the singer Lio, her best friend. Marie was also staying with her partner at the time, the singer Bertrand Cantat, leader of the band Noir Désir. He was the one who reported that Marie had fallen unconscious. In the hospital, she underwent several operations to try to reverse the coma. The family decided to move Marie Trintignant to France, where she died on August 1, aged just 41.

But what happened that July night in the hotel room the actress shared with Cantat? The singer's initial statements spoke of a very violent fight between the two, to the point that she fell and hit her head on the radiator. "An accident." The French press had no trouble buying that story. From rock star to murderer, the docuseries about the case released on Netflix, Pascal Nègre, president of Universal Music in France at the time, recalls how Noir Désir was much more than the country's hottest band in the 1990s. They represented the quintessential paradigm of a truly French rock group, to the point of becoming a popular phenomenon capable of filling stadiums and selling up to a million copies of an album. France loved Noir Désir and Bertrand Cantat. And it swallowed the narrative of the accident that occurred in the middle of a heated argument. Until the autopsy changes things.

In the series, the medical examiner's account is un-su-p-ar-ta-ble because of how it reveals the extreme violence the actress suffered. Cantat beat Trintignant to death. And with these facts on the table, the musician could now be accused of murder. The docuseries follows how, despite the evidence, both the musician and the media manage to generate another narrative in which he becomes the victim. Trintignante was allegedly the one who instigated the fight. The idea of a "crime of passion" begins to emerge. The story and its protagonists fit perfectly with that terrible concept so deeply rooted in the French cultural imagination. The actress with an unconventional love life and the passionate singer allegedly experienced a relationship so intense that it could only end this badly. A tragedy. The media, the music industry, and much of intellectual circles embrace the crime of passion narrative. The band supports its leader. So does Krisztina Rády, Cantat's wife and mother of his two children, whom he had abandoned for Marie. Her testimony on behalf of her husband was key in getting Bertrand Cantat's sentence reduced to just eight years in prison. He was released after four. And he resumed his life together with his first wife. Krisztina Rády hanged herself in the Bordeaux home they shared in 2010, while Cantat slept.

Through a detailed recap of the Cantat case, From rock star to murderer analyzes how exculpatory narratives are generated around men who commit sexist crimes, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, and how Me Too has helped change these terrible dynamics. Heir to the talent of her parents, Nadine and Jean-Louis, Marie Trintignant left us a legacy of splendid performances in films such as Betty and A women's issue by Claude Chabrol, Ponette by Jacques Doillon and Janis and John of Samuel Benchetrit, which preserve his memory forever.